enjoy the sunshine and soft breeze and let the >> a few years ago, i attended a public event at sfaliason, i don't know if you were there but it had a huge impact on me. i went to hear alaferalaison speak and instead a heard a neuro biologist and a snow flake scientist and tj clark who is an arc historian. it was amazing, it was the most amazing night. and we have actually modeled our public programs off of that event ever since.

we like at the arts commission to broad a broader dialogue around the works that we show. not just having the artists themselves present, but to present different ways of thinking about their work, different ways of thinking about contemporary art in general. and leaving you thinking, as you leave. so, tonight we have someone from young and we have a photographer who is not in the show, alongside of our current existing artists. if you like this program, you will like other things that we do in terms of our public programs. tonight, we will hear our featured artists and then from the invited guests who i will introduce. if there is time i will direct a couple of questions in their direction. there will be no q, and a, tonight this program was not designed as a dialogue and we hope that you will attend

before it closes. we are going to start with the artists. brenda, snosa who is in the blue shirt, he works in amsterdam and received his ba and his ma in 2005 from the frank mart institute in holland. he has exhibited in tipai, pa ris, and many others and now san francisco. last mobsinger he opened his first large scale solo expedition at land of tomorrow in kentucky, which i didn't know about. i encourage you to look up that institution. it is an incredible, incredible space. and program. his work resides in the sachi and smithsonian and others. he has written about in art publications his work was recognized by time magazine as

one of the top ten inventions of 2012. it is represented by lonkini gallery in london and now i would like to have him come up and speak. [ applause ] i'm benat and based in amsterdam and i want to show you some works. so, my work and installations, and sculpture and photos and site and working on the architecture or the history of the location. i am interested in a motion of friction between construction and de, construction and the physical state of a building

and a moment of revolution and perishableness and in these transitional situations you are not sure what you are looking at. nor this is as a clear function yet and therefore it is opened for interpretation and it is really interesting. and this work broad art, it is really the space that is important. because it is the location the museum that gets the contexts to just change the interpretation of this painting while it is resting against the wall for a brief moment. and i will... yeah. so often work with the situation to do with duality and the question inside and outside and size. the function of materials and architectural elements. yeah, i find it interesting when a work comes in between reality and representation and it will in the end not really

function and that is also a good example is also the work in the show at the gallery, at the moment. and so, this work is in the street view and then in 2009 i participated in a residency in ireland. and when i looked for information, i was directed to wisconsin. and so it is one of the oldist towns in ireland and around the 1940s a lot of irish people immigrated to the utah and a few set up in newtown, in wisconsin. and in the google maps you will find the street view and the first building that you see is a barn, a typical barn. and i find it interesting that out of everything in town that has not been photographed by google yet and also this idea

of when you are looking something original, you find a certificate. and so, i copied this barn and placed this facade or prop in the most resymboling location in the original town of ireland. and the idea was we thought that the google car would come by, that this image would be picked up and the barn would exist in both. it was up for two weeks but i knew that the car was in the neighborhood. but recently i found out that after two years, it did. so now there is a google street with the same house. and i really like that idea of transition, where you then take an image from the internet and put it in the real world to be captured and placed back on-line so that really

questions reality. so that is also i am interested in. so we go to the nibus works. and the nibus works, well on this distinct moment on a location and you could look at them as a only situation maybe? or just an element from a classical painting. but what i am really interested in, and the temporary aspect of the work so it is just there for a few seconds and then it falls apart and so the work exists, the physical aspect is important but the work exists as a photograph. and this photograph, for instance, as a document of something that happened in a specific location. and also the space. well, for instance, basically as a photo work and with every space i try to keep a connection to an exhibition

space and also to the relation of the artwork. and also because, yeah, you could ask yourself that you could taste of the well exposed air basically. and so much interested in the whole process of making the clouds. but rather in the idea of the emergency of a cloud inside of a space. and, first cloudy made in the small skills space put over, which is an exhibition space. yeah, it is a small, mobile space, the walls are not higher than, think about was it three feet. to control the space i thought that it would be kind of the idea to exhibit the rain cloud. and also yes, you start making,

and you start making the ideal situation actually. and therefore, i think that a model can only not stand for an idea. so the exhibition space into my ideal perception of a museum space which was the natural gallery in dublin. and i presented that to exhibit the rain cloud. and i really liked that, well the fleeting ideas of the work that it builds up and falls apart at the same time. so after that, i started working in the professional sized spaces. and so, yeah, your locations are important for the work and also well making the work in a exhibition space is also putting it in legalsing to art and history of that spacing and also, like the one before in the museum space you could say that it is related to painting in that way. you could think of it maybe as

an escape element from a landscape banding in the physical form. and in this case, this also, emphasizes more of the defined and fleeting context at work. so, well, yeah, but what do you see as a tleltening and a defined situation just by taking the cloud out of the context and presenting it in the space itself. besides the opportunity to take a lot of ideas on it. and all of the space i used is quite important and kind of most of the time we are presented this ideal space. and this was something totally different and this exhibition, i showed the work together with other works which were quite solid. and this exhibition, only the cloud exists in the form of the catalog. and in the exhibition it is

gone. but, i make the clouds with the combination of smoke and (inaudible) and as we space it works different. it is more industrial space. and also, here it is like a better situation than like an art typical cloud, almost. but, boy, to do and on my research on how to make that, i run into this material called aro gel. and it is calls frozen smoke and it consists of 99.8 percent of air and the lightest solid material on earth and i used it for collect interstellar dust and it has a beautiful shine and you could look right through it. and so what i did is i put it

on small models of exhibition sprays and it shows the same idea and you don't basically err on an empty space. and thes artificial material and it is just a little bit more dense than air and so, that space and therefore it redecember pells also and presents also the idea that our human urge to compete with nature and yeah, that is what i think is interesting about it. so, other than that, i work and i like the materials and i work with construction materials and artificial elements. and this work, the continual work p they exist of the galleries and the relationship. and even through the gallery and what it does is confer to

be a gallery referred to the enterceptic air, with the hospitals and sickness and deaths maybe. and then you will notice this air is clean and safe in any materials and therefore you start to question the space as well. is it safe here? are you truly safe? what is this place trying to protect me from? and so this work is really valid. and so this piece is called unflepin and i projected a spectrum on to a landscape and make it even more desirable and so the suggestion is that it can be seen as a promise or perfection, but by turning it upside down you start to question the values again and so, again that is changing and so the ideal landscape can also be interpreted as a optical

image maybe, and then this past image really shows the detail of almost of it off the anchor. and it is not that i am really interested in the nature, it is more like the ungraspable aspect of nature that i find interesting and all of the meanings and the myths that people have created for them through time. and i work with that. that is it. >> hi, so next up, i am going to introduce, doug record who was born in san jose and study history and sociology at ucsan diego in 1994. he is the founder of two web sites, american suburb x,

founded in 2008 is an ever growing ar khief and fiercely edited work at photography's past rapidly shifting present and dramatically unfolding the future and these americans, which is an american historical and cultural archive organized by theme. the recent one is pictures by google's street view. the images capture sites of america where rates of poverty and unemployment are high and educational opportunities are slim. photographs from a new american picture were included in the new photography 2011 exhibition at mona in new york. and also has been seen at exhibitions at la ball in paris and pier 21 here in san

francisco. a monograph was published in 2011. and it is represented by local galleries and sf galleries would like to thank steven orts and the staff for the support of this event. we asked doug to speak today in order to draw threads from his work until asketon has street view which is currently on view in the gallery. doug i will turn it over to you. >> thanks for coming. i appreciate it. i am looking forward to giving you some details on this. i have 15 minutes, so i am not going to talk about all of them. there are so many layers of consideration to this and each of these areas could sort of veer off into its own talk and so i am going to talk to some of the things that may overlap with aaron's work.

and i want to go through the pictures and let you look at the pictures and absorb sort of what they mean and how they impact you. the pictures speak volumes and i think that you will get a lot just by absorbing that and so wait that these were made, they were made through street view. i took a three-year period, started in 09, and basically explored our american cities in depth. and granular fashion, neighborhood by neighborhood, not every city, but places that i was interested in looking at. and i started making pictures and amasked the large archive, probably 10,000 images that i made throughout this period and i widled it down to around 80 to make this work. i will describe some of the dynamics of street view and sort of the implications. so we sort of now at this point

firmly that photography only is partial truth. it really is affected by so many variables that you get half truths and half varying context that some of which you bring in yourself. but what happens is the photographer takes a moment of time, in this case one second in a place and we are left to look at it and make assessments and judgment and make, you know, our own back story to the images and so there is an element of this that we don't really know the struting. we sort of see what we, what is in front of us. and we start to take that in and decide, you know, what we think that truth is. google has taken these pictures of every cinch of our country for the most part and doing it in other countries as well. some of the other countries are resisting, germany, places where there is a history of big

brotheresque type of regime. but for most of america we have welcomed it for the most part with open arms. we don't see the out pouring and out cry that we see in other countries. but the cars are going around and covering a 360 degree view, every 30 feet or so. and it is really a machine making the images, i have sort of come in and hijack that machine afterwards and pieced together a narrative from within this ocean of imagery. but they are going along and taking the pictures, and building up really a virtual space from within, which i traversed. and it was wild. it is sort of like a frozen world, really and there is movement of the camera, 360 degrees. but it is frozen. there are moments in time and in 2007. when this car goes by just like that and was gone, most of the time people don't know that

there are pictures being taken and it really bakes into this work something different than the work that would be taken on the street. there is sort of visual connections to street photography and there is philosophical connections. you know there is some movement by me, that yet, the camera was a machine and it was taken from a height of about 7 feet of a fixed position. no one was wandering around and chosing various points of view and it presented to me this huge canvas of america, you know, that was pretty massive in terms of geography and yet just a small window and we don't see into these people's lives and we don't really know what is happening outside of the frame or where they are going and we don't know anything about them. so i went through exploring places that went from urban areas to small little towns

along the border between mexico and the u.s. and a lits dusty towns or right in downtown baltimore and i spent a huge amount of time doing that. so if you think about it, this robot takes the picture and it takes a picture consistently from the same place and it is really i guess objective. more objective than any taking pictures. any journalist would also present a point of view. there is no point of view initially when these pictures were made, but then i am coming in and creating a point of view from within this ocean of imagery. as a flip through a few of these and let you look through these. you can see the city name down on the lower left, mississippi. the number next to the city is

the derivative of the gps marker for this google location and i sort of transposed the numbers and used that. i wanted to connotate that virtual world and also there was a visual connection to the photographic heritage that was pretty wild. on top of this moment in time, there is also a breaking down of the imagery thaps in the google pictures themselves, most of these are lo fi and i chose that i guess because of the esthetics. it did not contain the same look as these and it also erode the truth and makes the lens a little bit blurry, it alters things from a technical point of view.

so, you could see these pictures that sort of describe them as drive-by pictures that we are drive-by really captures this and not necessarily immersive in any way. it is literally a car driving by capturing a moment. some of this has been done in the past, walker evans took pictures out of a moving vehicle. in fact, strangely, right upstairs in the library before this talk i was looking through my side and i have on there a gallery from evans that is called drive by pictures and it is about 30 images of him flying down the road in mississippi and georgia and taking pictures of shot gun shacks and so forth from this moving car that was zipping along. and so there are other photographers that have explored the drive by.

and in this case it was like i was hijacking this virtual world and also emerging myself in it. and i came to know these towns and these places almost in a way as if i ex-flowered it. it is really change, really a strange thing. and i know this super well, and i have never been there. >> i know every street in my mind i see the layout of the neighborhoods. you know the main streets and the turn offs? strange thing, i was thinking who would have thought that three decades ago that someone would be presenting a pick of america that was taken by machines and then hijacked and then represented, and reshown here in a library in san francisco? it just struck me as odd, i

wonder what some of these prior photographers would have thought about it. it is sort of a new world in the way that we are throwing ourselves into a virtual world in a fast and furious way and we are glued to our phones for everything that we, you know, not everything, but we are all glued to our phones to a lot of what we learn and see. and we are increasingly looking at pictures as a language more so than it ever was. there would have been life magazine and newspapers and now the images are created on the order of 30 million a year are being added annually and that is growing and we are increasingly viewing our world through a virtual space. it is just really on overload. and so this work i guess is a symbol of that, in a way.

color was important. there is color to represent america in a way. i wanted what i felt were american colors. certainly. how do you define american colors? you know? some of these things, existed within me and you know, sort of how i viewed america, right? some of these places may look entirely different in person. it is like a separate world here.

even though it is reality, this really is a place and this really is a picture from google and anyone can go and look up these pictures when you leave here, you can ex-mror dallas yourself this way if you want. but in a way, there are these filters that are in front of everything that we view now and it has to do with choice, selection, treatment, the asthetic, how it is broken down or how clear it is. all of these things sort of enter into the equation and really make us question what true, truth is verses half truth. you know, i come from a photographic background. so it is different, you know? than than another artist approaching a platform like

this. you can tell that i am looking for composition and certain themes that a photographer is driven to seek. these are just words. my first book that i did of this work i just opened it and i didn't want an essay or anything like that. and i just came up with key words like on a blog or a website, and i wanted the words all over the place, positive and negative all of it. basically american words, cheese berger, vegas, hooker. levee, armed forces. this is sort of the america that i have running through my head and it is filled with lots of themes and conflicting ideals and unifying ideals. and human ideals and material

ideals. all of it. so i just did the brain storm over a week or so and just kept jotting down words and i keep sort of riffing into the american themes and this is a screen shot. and thes an archive and it is massive and i think that we are as artists are going to be sifting through the archives and how can you not when there are images being created and every has a digital slr in their hand or a camera in their phone and everyone can make a good picture now not everyone, but it is not, it gos beyond that and i can that we are going to look backwards as much as forwards. we are having all of this information in front of us. and people will sift through it, and bring ideas for it. and this is the utmost

importance. and you can have the titles and they are pretty loaded, right? and it is something that interests me and i guess the loaded cop i cans in america to put it mildly interesting. the overhauled it and i published this site. and it is a huge archive and i looked at it as unlimited possibilities for editing and archiving and curating and publishing and i thought it was just amazing that i have the power at my fingertips to do anything that i wanted without any sort of limits only right here was the only limit and so the site really features other people's work and i don't put my work on it and it is basically, i thought, what can i do something like interview magazine like warhol did? i have the tools and i started five years ago and it has grown into huge proportions, i think